Exhalations from our readers

NOTE: The opinions expressed here represent the opinions
of the authors and do not necessarily represent the opinions of those who
hold other opinions.

Mailing Mössbauer

A colleague of mine just came back from the “International Conference
on the Applications of the Mössbauer Effect” in Oxford where
he met some Italian and German physicists and chemists who printed a series
of Mössbauer stamps with a picture of Rudolf Mössbauer and a spectrum
corresponding to different Mössbauer isotopes. Obviously, those stamps
were from the “Kingdom of Nuclear Gamma Resonnance,” where the
currency is the “mm/s.” Too bad I don’t have a scanner
here to send you the pictures. Dr Lorenzo Stievano from the Universita’
Ca’ Foscari was one of the main “authors.”

Anyway, the funny thing is that they tried to mail postcards using those
stamps in various countries. One hundred percent of them got through the
mail system in Britain and Italy. Would these countries be more Mössbauer-friendly
than others? This seems a nice sequel to the postal experiments described
in your July/August 2000 issue.

~ Nicolas Sabourin
Department of Physics
University of Ottawa
Ottowa, ON

Mel and Al and Great-Granddad (2)

Here is another historical photograph of Mel, and my great-grandfather,
and Einstein, and some other people. My grandfather is the one standing
next to Mel.

~ Paloma McMartin, Ph.D.
East Hampton, NY

Sleep Datum

James Otis Francis Tolland Richardson says (AIR 8:6) he is looking for
people who fall asleep while watching black-and-white movies but do not
fall asleep while watching color movies. I am such a person, and would be
happy to volunteer to be one of his research subjects. I fall asleep only
if the movie has sound — I hope this does not disqualify me.

~ Wen-Hua Kauang, M.D.
Tienjin, China

Mel Under Scrutiny

For years you have been publishing all those photographs of the little
man named Mel. Are all of those the same photograph? And am I, as a subscriber,
the subject of some very obscure research you are doing about exposure to
these photographs?